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Sunday morning in Felton is abuzz, first with the Maker Market in the parking lot next to my apartment, complete with a lot of handcrafted items, face-painted children and the luxury — for me anyway — of listening to a great local band, the Coffis Brothers, from the cozy confines of the world’s rattiest, yet most comfortable, couch.

But enough of me and the beautiful day, let’s get back to the blog.

Projectus Interruptus: You have to hand it to Canonical. They paint an awesome — no, and inspirational — picture of what they plan to do, but when it comes to completing the projects? Well, the record there is, at best, spotty. Ubuntu for Android may follow Ubuntu TV as the latest not-ready-for-real-life project, according to an article in PC World. Well, at least they finished Ubuntu One before pulling the plug on this. By the way, has anyone heard anything recently about the smartphone-to-end-all-smartphones that Canonical tried to fund with an Indiegogo campaign?
Speaking of phones . . . : I finally broke down and got a ZTE Open with Firefox OS on it. My first impressions are that it’s pretty spartan — and when I described it as such to the 20-something clerk at T-Mobile, I answered his blank stare with, “you know, spartan . . . It means austere” — though it works just fine. As I’ve said many times in this blog, I only want my phone to ring, hold a connection, and send/receive text messages; and the latter I could live with or live without. It clearly lacks the bells and whistles that my previous phone, a HTC G2 now handed down to my daughter, had with Android. But I expect this to be temporary as more programs are either developed or more apps are ported from Android and elsewhere. But for the moment, Firefox OS works and works well for my needs. Plus with the orange case with black trim, the ZTE Open phone is in the team colors of my beloved San Francisco Giants.

More on Heartbleed: Simon Phipps absolutely nailed it this week in an InfoWorld article about the OpenSSL’s “unique” license discouraging the necessary scrutiny to avert this crisis. The license in question was a hybrid that doesn’t really lend itself to community engagement, according to David Wheeler, an expert in government use of Open Source Software.

Said Wheeler: “I suspect that more code review and contributions would occur if OpenSSL used a standard widely used license … this awkward licensing situation means that many people who prefer the GPL or LGPL will often not help develop or audit OpenSSL. Some of those who prefer less-restrictive licenses may also be less inclined to help, because again, it is not a standard license.”

Interesting stuff. Anyway, we’ll see you next week.

This blog, and all other blogs by Larry the Free Software Guy, Larry the CrunchBang Guy, Fosstafarian, Larry the Korora Guy, and Larry Cafiero, are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND license. In short, this license allows others to download this work and share it with others as long as they credit me as the author, but others can’t change it in any way or use it commercially.

(Larry Cafiero is one of the founders of the Lindependence Project and develops business software at Redwood Digital Research, a consultancy that provides FOSS solutions in the small business and home office environment.)

He has risen on Easter Sunday, and no longer referring to myself in the third person I’ll get a cup of coffee and a bagel and drop off a few tidbits from the week, or weeks, past.

He likes it . . . hey, Matt! After not really taking to it in the same way, Jupiter Broadcasting’s Matt Hartley actually like GNOME enough to start using it on a regular basis, according to an item in his blog this week. “Like the KDE desktop, GNOME 3 is full of functionality if you’re willing to invest a little time configuring it the way you like it,” Matt writes. “Where I think GNOME really shines, however, is that even without additional extensions installed, it’s still a great experience in its overall flow and layout. Less clicks to gain menu access, easily locate needed applications, for me GNOME has it all.”

Am I going to try it again after reading Matt’s glowing praise? Nope. But it does speak to one of the basic tenets of FOSS: Use what works for you.

Maybe FOSS doesn’t suck after all: What I think is the most interesting race today is whether Malaysian Airlines 370 is found before data compromises from Heartbleed can be stopped. Thanks to Heartbleed — the gift that keeps on giving (or taking) and which will be months before a resolution is in place — the failure of open-source OpenSSL has been the “standard” by which all Open Source projects have been pilloried in the mainstream media and, sadly, in some of the eyeball-grabbing ought-to-know-better tech media as well.

Well, there’s no argument that the Heartbleed flaw was a monumental and historic one, however Coverity seems to think that “open source is still well ahead of proprietary software, generating fewer coding defects for every size of project,” according to an article in Network World last week. So while no thoughtful FOSS advocate has ever proclaimed invincibility, it might give one pause to recognize the old Debian adage that “with great power comes great responsibility.” Or in the words of one poster during a debate on this in social media, we need to play more defense and less offense.

Seems like I’m forgetting something: Oh yeah, Ubuntu released another adjective/animal combination starting with the letter T. Yes, it still sends your data to Amazon and eBay by default, and if you’re OK with that, go ahead and give it a shot. If you have to use it, your best bet here would be Xubuntu, judging from past experience.

Now to enjoy some Easter eggs and commune with my Peeps. Happy Easter to those who observe it.

This blog, and all other blogs by Larry the Free Software Guy, Larry the CrunchBang Guy, Fosstafarian, Larry the Korora Guy, and Larry Cafiero, are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND license. In short, this license allows others to download this work and share it with others as long as they credit me as the author, but others can’t change it in any way or use it commercially.

(Larry Cafiero is one of the founders of the Lindependence Project and develops business software at Redwood Digital Research, a consultancy that provides FOSS solutions in the small business and home office environment.)